Special Session on Agent-Based and Multi-Agent modeling of conflict and combat
Motivation and Objective
The study of social conflict phenomena, ranging from peaceful protests and the formation of social movements, to riots and violent confrontations, civil violence, insurgence and war, is an important and timely topic in history, political science, sociology, social psychology, security studies and military sciences. However, this study is very difficult due to the heterogeneity of social conflict phenomena and the complexity of the players, interactions, processes, mechanisms and scales involved. Furthermore, widespread access to Social Networks (SN) and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) introduced dramatic changes in the dynamics of social conflict processes.
More recently, this topic became important in the contexts of Social Simulation, Complex Systems Studies, Agent-Based and Multi-Agent modeling. A number of Agent-Based models have been proposed for simulation of civil violence, revolution, worker protest, insurgence and combat, and also in related areas such as crowd dynamics and panic evacuation.
The objective of this special session is to attract authors to present work at the forefront of the research on these topics, and provide an ambient suitable for multidisciplinary discussion of the state-of-the-art on these and related issues, with emphasis on foundations, agent/model architectures, simulation platforms and context data for model validation.
Scope & Interests
Prospective authors are invited to submit papers on the following topics, or on other topics related to Agent-Based or Multi-Agent modeling of:
- Crowd dynamics with violent confrontation
- Mobilization and formation of social movements
- Large scale civil violence, protests and revolution
- Insurgence and combat
Given the motivation and objective, papers with significant treatment of the following issues will have increased interest:
- Analysis of theoretical foundations and mechanisms
- Comparison of different model and agent architectures
- Methodology of model development
Please submit your papers through email to Prof. Helder Coelho (hcoelho@di.fc.ul.pt)
We kindly request that you keep in mind the deadline for papers submissions: July 15, 2015.